


Without A Home, Without A Friend, Without A Face To Say Hello To

by creatureofhobbit



Category: The A List (TV 2018)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-01
Updated: 2019-12-01
Packaged: 2021-02-26 01:14:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,880
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21634942
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/creatureofhobbit/pseuds/creatureofhobbit
Summary: As Midge, she had never belonged. As Amber, she does
Comments: 3
Kudos: 9
Collections: The 100 Multifandom Challenge





	Without A Home, Without A Friend, Without A Face To Say Hello To

No one remembered that Midge had also missed the ferry.

Amber had said that not just to account for her late arrival, but deliberately to watch for their reactions. She hadn’t really expected anyone to remember the way everyone had looked through her on that day when Dave had brought her over in the middle of whatever stupid icebreaker they were all doing to introduce themselves.

“Guys, this is Midge. She missed the earlier ferry.”

Midge had tried to smile at people, but even then she could see that people weren’t going to pay attention to her. She could already tell that they seemed to have divided into two groups, one being Mia, Kayleigh, Jenna, Brendan, Zac and Dev, the other Alex, Petal and Harry. She’d tried to join in with the icebreaker, which appeared to consist of everyone throwing a ball to each other and coming up with a fact about themselves, but because she’d arrived so late it had mostly wound down and seemed to be only Mia and Dev actually playing.

When she got to her cabin, she found herself with Kayleigh, Mia and Jenna. They’d all claimed the best bunks, of course, leaving her to pick the crap bunk closest to the door, the one that got all the cold air. Midge had sat and listened as Kayleigh hung on every word of Mia’s talking crap about clothes, of Jenna going on about some guy named Stefan, just waiting for one of them to notice she was there and include them in her conversation, but they never did. The rest of the group seemed just as bad; Alex and Petal having eyes for no one but each other from the start, Zac and Brendan chatting about boring football the entire evening. Midge had only been there a few hours, and already she knew she would never belong with this lot.

After the first day, Midge was mostly left to herself. Harry had tried to talk to her at one point, but she’d got so sick of hearing about his various ailments and injuries that she’d ended up snapping at him to get lost. Now, though, finding herself alone most of the time, randomly paired with whoever Dave chose for her for any of the activities, she sometimes wished she’d tried harder with him.

Being mostly alone gave her the chance to observe the other campers. She’d noticed, for instance, that Jenna had contradicted herself when talking about her “boyfriend” Stefan, although no one else seemed to have, and eventually one day when Dave had paired them for some activity and Jenna started on about him again, Midge had called her out on it and Jenna admitted that he was just someone she’d kissed back home and it hadn’t gone anywhere. Jenna had been nicer to Midge after that, right until she was sure that Midge wasn’t going to repeat it to Mia, but had then gone back to ignoring her again.

She’d noticed Brendan, too, noticed that he had feelings for Kayleigh, but was trying to hide it since it was clear that Kayleigh and Zac only had eyes for each other. Midge couldn’t see her appeal, herself. From what she had seen, Kayleigh was a yes-woman, someone who seemed to have few opinions of her own that didn’t coincide exactly with Mia’s. And yet both Brendan and Zac were hanging on every word of someone with so little to say for herself, while looking right through Midge as though she wasn’t there.

It was amazing how much you could notice about people when no one ever noticed you.

The idea of being queen at the Midsummer party wasn’t something that would normally have appealed to Midge, but when she heard Kayleigh and Jenna speculating that Dev was likely to be the king, she started to imagine what it would be like if she could be queen, Dev as king by her side. Not that it was likely to happen, of course. Even if Kayleigh hadn’t sycophantically wittered that Mia had it in the bag, Midge knew full well that she had no chance.

It was all anyone had been talking about for the last couple of days. Kayleigh was going to use the party as a chance to ask out Zac, Alex and Petal were using the party as their first real date. On the hike the day before the party Jenna had been paired with Midge and had asked her if she was going to ask anyone (Mia had just asked another awkward question about Stefan, and it was her way of diverting attention). Midge had just brushed Jenna off – there was no way she was going to admit anything to one of Mia’s acolytes. But ever since the Capture the Flag activity, when Dev had helped her after she fell in the water (which Midge still thought Mia had had a hand in, even as she denied it), Midge had wondered what he could possibly see in someone as up herself as Mia, whether there was a chance he would ever be interested in her. He’d been the only one who’d taken any notice of her that day, had been the one to pick her for his team (even if it had been a choice between her and Harry), had been the only one who had even noticed when she fell in the water, the only one worth anything in that camp.

When Midge saw Dev for once on his own, without any of the hangers on, she knew that had to be the moment. Trying not to stumble over her words, she asked him that all important question. He’d tried to be nice about it, explained that he thought she was a great girl but he liked someone else…Mia.

She’d thought she could deal with it. Then she’d heard Dev and all his friends talking.

“So, do you think it’s going to be the night, huh? You and Mia?” Zac was asking.

“Nah, mate, didn’t you hear? Gonna be him and Midge,” Brendan replied before bursting out laughing.

Zac stared at him. “What did you say?”

Dev sounded annoyed. “Leave it, Brendan. I wish I hadn’t told you that.” To Zac, he explained “Midge asked me out this afternoon. I tried to let her down gently, but this idiot saw her running away and asked me about it. He hasn’t shut up about it since.”

“I don’t know who Midge thinks she’s kidding if she thinks you’d ever be interested in her,” Kayleigh wittered. “Anyone can see you and Mia are so much more suited.”

Midge ran, determined to get the hell out of there before any of them realised she had heard. She wondered who she thought she had been kidding, thinking Dev would ever be interested in someone like her. There was only ever going to be the superficial Mia, the self centred queen bee. She tried to tell herself that at least she knew now, that if Mia was what he was interested in she was clearly better off without him, tried to plaster a fake smile on her face as she joined the rest of the group at the party, watched as Mia was crowned and claimed Dev for her king. But as she watched them all, Mia dancing with Dev, Alex with Petal, Kayleigh with Zac, Midge could feel the red mist rising before her eyes as they all laughed without a care in the world, none of them sparing a thought for how they had humiliated her.

She still didn’t know what she had hoped to achieve if she had actually managed to make it to the party. She had just seen red once again when Zac had casually mentioned that Petal had won the Peregrine Hunt ages ago, and Kayleigh had just said “O.M.G. I think we forgot all about her,” and it had been clear to her that neither of them actually cared. Had she intended to make one last attempt to try and join in with them? To finally confront them about the way they had all ignored her the whole time they had been at camp?

It hardly mattered now, given that she had woken up in the hospital, looking at her face in the mirror and unable to recognise the person looking back. Mags had been there, trying to explain to her about how that chemical worked, that ambrosine which was unique to Peregrine Island, how they had used it as an experimental treatment on her, except they had not foreseen the effect it would have on her.

The face looking back at her looked like the person she had always wanted to be; the person who was able to win the hearts and minds of the other campers. Since Midge Rayne was legally dead, she could be whoever she wanted to be; “Midge Rebecca Rayne” became “Amber I. Cadence-Grey”, a name chosen for the fact that one was an anagram of the other. It was only afterwards that she realised the other significance of the name Amber; as amber fossils were capable of preserving bugs, so the Amber persona was preserving Midge, leaving her trapped within the body that was not her own, stuck in that moment of pure anger at everyone for having abandoned her to the woods, partying without even remembering she was there.

She hated and loved the Amber persona at the same time; hated the way she no longer knew who Midge Rayne was any more as she looked at the face that was not her own, felt trapped all the time in the unfamiliar body, as though she had lost all sense of herself. And yet she loved the way that now people would flock to her; the way she was able to bend them all to her will, to create the camp experience she had wanted for herself the previous year. She enjoyed watching as yes-woman Kayleigh, who had barely acknowledged her the year before, was now so pathetically desperate for her attention, as Jenna humiliated herself by throwing herself at Harry, confessed the truth about Stefan and trashed the food at the party, believing it all to contain bugs. She enjoyed playing on the love triangle she had observed between Kayleigh, Brendan and Zac the year before, as she made Brendan and Kayleigh believe they were the ones who were together, planned to humiliate Brendan in a spectacular fashion after the way he had laughed at her feelings for Dev. She enjoyed seeing Mia, once the darling of the camp, shunned and ignored by her fellow campers, and rejected by Dev, just as Mia had once done to Midge. Sometimes she would try and re-enact moments that had happened to Midge the year before, such as when she pretended to fall in the river after Capture the Flag and allowed everyone to think Mia had pushed her, just to see if anything sparked a memory of Midge, almost provoking them, yet never getting a flicker of recognition. To them, Midge had never existed.

Midge Rebecca Rayne had never belonged with the camp. Amber I. Cadence-Grey does.

Yet she still has moments where it feels like she doesn’t belong with herself.


End file.
